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The Daily Beast
17 December
2009
When They Were Young
by Olivia Cole
Five years ago,
the famed British art collector Charles Saatchi bought Annie Kevans’
Boys show in its entirety. The work featured paintings of the world’s
greatest dictators—from Hitler to Ceaucescu to Pol Pot—in their
younger and more vulnerable, and crucially, for her brand of weirdly
unsettling portraiture, prettier years.
Since that first
show, her work has been bought by other serious collectors from David
Roberts and original YBA Mark Quinn in London to French
photographer/playboy Jean Pigozzi. Kevans is now represented in the
U.S. by Perry Rubenstein (her first solo show in New York will be in
February) and at Art Basel Miami Beach, the gallery sold three
paintings to John McEnroe.
The private view
for Kevans’ latest show, Ship of Fools, took place on an icy night in
the shadow of Tower Bridge, on the Golden Hinde, a replica of Sir
Francis Drake’s ship. Here was Sylvia Plath (in her blond,
overachieving college years) in the ship’s prow, Ernest Hemingway
(almost unrecognizably young, slim, and handsome), Picasso , Michael
Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Disraeli, and Churchill, both of whom
suffered from crippling depression. And here were the usual
private-view crowd, stooped and clambering around the ship’s tiny
cabins, high heels making the ladders potentially lethal. Like much of
her works—mass killers who appear completely innocent, or child stars
who, with their black underwear and red lipstick, seem to give the
viewer the come-on—Ship of Fools, quite literally, put Kevans’ viewers
in an uncomfortable place.
This gallery of
breakable brilliant people is now on show until December 23 at the
Fine Art Society on Bond Street. A few hundred years ago, she reminds
me, “mad” people “were put on ships, sent off abroad, and just
basically thrown out of the community. And that’s where the original
idea came from.” (Foucault’s Madness and Civilization was key to her
thinking.) Far from buying into the stigma, her literal ship, was, she
maintains, “supposed to make you think about the horror of it.”
Selecting her gifted subjects, she was struck by “how much poorer
society would have been without them,” and wondered, as the viewer
can't help but do, what might have happened if they had been born in
the wrong century.
Comparing the
faces of Kevans’ “fools” and her audience, the first question, one
wonders if she buys into the oft-quoted belief that great art can only
come out of suffering? “Do I think that their brilliance pushed them
over the edge?” the 36-year-old British artist asks. “No.” Could her
subjects be brilliant because they were more complex in the first
place? “No!” she laughs. “There is that kind of idea but if you look
at the percentage there are so many people who are not mentally ill
who are extremely talented and successful.’”
With their black
spells though, and untimely tragic deaths (from Plath to Jackson,
Jackson Pollock, Hemingway and Monroe and Michael Jackson) gathered in
sad company like this, that romantic idea of the genius for whom the
world is too much, seems just one of the easy structures over which
she paints an arch question.
From the
depiction of childhood innocence in her sepia-toned Boys series, to
the sexualization of childhood in Girls, to public vs. private
morality in her 2008 Volta show All the President’s Girls (which
featured portraits of presidential mistresses, from Sally Hemings to
Monica Lewinsky), Kevans’ real motivation is “how we deal with things
and how things change very quickly. I think that’s the main thing
about my work, it’s always, really, about how we treat people: how we
treat each other, and how things become acceptable." Today’s
incarceration in institutions, is yesterday’s ship heading off to who
knew where.
Despite the
famous names she has depicted from Bush to Saddam, Shirley Temple to
Jodie Foster, celebrity, she says, isn’t the point. The famous faces
become a kind of shorthand: “It’s as though if you use a familiar
face, suddenly everyone knows what you are talking about,” she
explains.
Girls, for
example, included a brilliantly prophetic depiction of young Britney
Spears’ breakability. Spears was one of several dozen uncanny and
unsettling depictions of child stars: exploited yet cleverly
exploitative of the viewer too, as many of them (from the Olsen twins
to Brooke Shields circa Pretty Baby) are far sexier (or trying to be)
than they should be at that age. Kevans’ depictions face up to what
Hollywood has often skirted around.
The ideas take
on far more power through her technique. Her oil paintings have the
lightest of touches, and look more like pencil drawings or watercolors
than canvases loaded with paint, which creates a kind of tenderness.
With faces, she tries to make her portraits appear as they do when you
are talking to someone. The eyes are key, in her pictures, “because
when you look at a person, the eyes always stand out as much stronger
than anything else on the face. Originally I was just trying to
capture facial features as you seem them.” That sense of intimate
encounter makes her work powerfully affecting.
If there’s
consolation in her new series, it’s perhaps that we are all mad now.
Several of her subjects, (Darwin, for instance) are silent victims of
posthumous diagnosis. “I love it.” she enthuses, slightly outraged.
“It’s like you can die sane, and then 200 or 500 years later someone
will diagnose you as insane and that’s it. I think it's hilarious.
Everyone has to have a label these days.” It’s testament to Kevans and
her strange ability to get inside the headlines and emerge with art as
beautiful as it is unsettling, that it’s awfully hard to think up a
label for her. Is she a YBA? Portrait painter? Pop artist?
“With
celebrities, too, now, there are all sorts of illnesses that have just
become quite fashionable,” she muses. “There’s a kind of thing where
say they’ve drunk too much or they’ve had terrible relationships,
especially in America, they are all coming out and saying, 'Well, I’ve
just been diagnosed as bipolar and that’s why I did all those
things.'” It’s a bold point, but I can’t help think that there’s some
truth in the idea that fragility is to a celebrity (and/or his lawyer)
who has trashed a hotel suite, what “intolerance” can be to a
pathological refusal to eat, and what sex addiction is to a love rat.
Tiger Woods,
there’s an Annie Kevans portrait in your future.
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